Macromemetic Index - SUSPECNA A Meduim Blog Post
Introduction
I've got an idea for a new "uniform law" that would reform how States deal with Federal elections (rather like Nebraska and Maine). This post includes some of the many notes and emails I've written on the subject so far.
Tasks to Accomplish
1. getting help from the Uniform Law Commission
2. drafting the legislation (with help from lawyer friends)
3. working out the voting system (e.g., ranked choice voting, and how to tally votes under such a system)
4. possibly including verbiage about Gerrymandering and other such voter suppression and inequality issues
5. reaching out to State legislators to get the law passed
6. looking into existing laws and practices (including what ballots look like) in the several States
7. other stuff (to be discovered)
ULC
There's a Uniform Law Commission (documented in Wikipedia) which has been around for a century and a half and whose mission seems to line up with my idea of getting each of the Several States to pass my Electoral College Act.
You know about the interstate pact to make the Electoral College irrelevant, right? When states with enough electoral votes to win the election (270) join that pact, it automatically goes into effect. The states agree to give all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. It seems air-tight to me. Is what you are working on different?
Yeah, I had major issues with the Interstate Popular Vote Compact as soon as I heard about it, and my worries were borne out by the recent Texas Supreme Court case against Pennsylvania, Georgia, and two other swing States. If an interstate compact exists regarding how States certify their electoral college results, nothing guarantees that states will disagree on how other states have counted their votes, and sue each other in the SCOTUS, and we already have proof that that can and will happen.
Even if the compact contains verbiage to the effect (and I haven't checked) that "signatory states shall respect the certified counts of other signatory states," or "signatories agree not to sue each other in the SCROTUS" or whatever. None of this is likely to work, even if it exists in the law, since there's a potentially infinitely deep set of Russian dolls of "yes, but they didn't count their votes right," or "the great State of Texas always has the right to seek relief in SCROTUS" or "yes, but...." or even as we saw in the electoral college of Texas, they deliberated for something like two hours about a resolution to SCROTUS decrying SCROTUS' decision to dismiss their suit against the other four States on the basis that they have no standing. By the way, they voted that the EC of Texas is a deliberative body and can discuss whatever and pass resolutions on whatever (including vote against the Interstate Compact if they decide, if Texas signs in future, which they are near to doing). Well, hey, I just thought of this -- the interstate compact would GIVE Texas standing (as an aggrieved party) in this situation, that is, SCROTUS would not have the same grounds for dismissal, i.e., they would have standing as a signatory of the interstate popular vote compact to sue other states over their vote counts. In other words, it would be Gore v. Bush times Biden v. Trump (where none of the cases are dismissed with prejudice as spurious this time) on steroids every single election. I could probably go on for a few more paragraphs.
So it's a huge truckload of crates of tins of worms, in my view, and I hope it doesn't pass enough states and dies a quiet death.
My idea is simply to create a law and get it pushed to the states as a Uniform Law, with the help of the Uniform Law Commission, that would do something like make all states choose their electors like Nebraska and Maine do (and I still need to read their laws in detail, as well as all the other states). By the way, I was unable to see the EC proceedings of those two states (ME, NE), so if you know any URLs, I'd be much obliged. I did watch a number of others, and it was exactly what I expected, and showed me that my idea for this
The idea is to get rid of the winner-takes-all rule. If we do that, we've effectively make the EC match up with the popular vote. People think the EC doesn't track the popular vote, because of the "at large" (Senator) electors, and yes, that as some impact, the ol' Wyoming voters get 193,000 votes per elector, while Texas, New York, and California voters are about three times that, and that makes Republicans (or whoever Gerrymanders Western States) easier to get votes.
Yeah, kind of, but I would argue that's not such a big deal, but that it's overshadowed by winner-take-all.
One complaint is "my vote doesn't count" if I'm blue in a red state or vice-versa, or green in a red state or whatever. Take Idaho. Depending on how you set things up, both districts might still go red, but the two at-large electors, one might go blue if all of the blue voters in the state So Idaho might elect three red and one blue, instead of always four blue. Also, one or both at-large electors could be "given" to a minority group. This is a kind of "out there" idea, I'll admit. But say you have a minority, like black people, or latinos, who are spread out all over, but are recognized as having their own political need. So if you're black or latino, you could opt for a latino or black ballot, in which you'd have the right to vote for one or both of the at-large electors, and of course the elector for your district, and regular voters would not have at-large electors on their ballots, just their local district electors.
I do want to do some analysis of past elections to see how things would've gone if my new law were in place, and maybe some what-ifs as to whether it were only partly in place.
Anyway, sorry if I sound heavy-handed. I was suspicious of the Interstate Popular Vote Compact from the off, I think it changes too much, and the Texas SCOTUS action just confirmed my suspicion about how it would be a destabilizing effect, rather than the reverse.
Anyway, yes, I'm unemployed and writing full time since April. What you said John Le Carré sounds like about what I'm doing. I hope to have something to show you, if you want, sometime soon. The first half of my chapters are in flux again, hopefully tidied up soon, then the last 1/3 of the book is kind of a shambles, too.
Once I fix the electoral college and gerrymandering, I think health care is next, and then some kind of amalgam of Universal Income, welfare, unionization, social security and maybe a few other things.
Got to make it so that people's votes actually count, so that candidates have to campaign in all of the states, not just the handful of swing states, and feel like none of them are guaranteed, and third party entrants become realistic. Anyway, I do blah, blah, blah.
PS: The working title for my new Uniform Law is SUSPECNA (Simplified Uniform State Popular Electoral College Normalization Act), which I'm sure you'll agree is superior to the forgettable "National Popular Vote Interstate Compact."
PPS: Probably some right-wing screed (I didn't read it through) but here's agreement and support for exactly what I just said. Yes, yes, it's almost certainly unconstitutional (some don't give a big rat's about that, others do). For me, as an information system engineer, I don't like non-convergent systems.
The name of your new law sounds suspicious. :) What are non-convergent systems?
I just discovered Robert Sapolsky -
https://youtu.be/_njf8jwEGRo?
He gives a great explanation of the butterfly effect, right at the place in the URL. But the whole lecture is very interesting.
He gives a great explanation of the butterfly effect, right at the place in the URL. But the whole lecture is very interesting.
I've heard from experts that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is legally very sound. Interstate compacts are allowed and respected in Supreme Court precedents, and the states have autonomy in how they select their electors. OTOH, we have arrived at a point in history where legal and constitutional structures are in danger of being ignored or overthrown by the Republican cult.
So I originally wrote all the following before the events of Wednesday the sixth (a day that will live in infamy). I may be able to safely further beat my drum of how the NPVIC might make things worse in terms of States suing each other or fighting each other in the January 6 joint session. The NPVIC could give grounds for objection where none would otherwise exist.
Let's all just let our own imaginations run wild in our own separate, socially-distanced garrets with the blinds drawn for now, shall we?
Yeah, I just feel that the NPVIC won't be a stable system, especially given the growing divisiveness we see. The voters in one state want candidate A and the voters in another state want candidate B, but the overall majority is for candidate B, so a "sovereign" state has to go against the will of its own voters and switch them all to candidate B. The people who have to execute that switcheroo are elected, paid by the state, and they may lose their jobs because of the action of voters in another state, and their elected officials. We've already seen way more wrangling in 2000 and 2020 over much less. I don't care how well-worded a law is, it's not going to change those facts right there, or probably a bunch of others.
I should try to come up with a mathematically rigorous description of "stability" in terms of the Electoral College.
It would be interested to hear what your experts say about the Texas SCOTUS suit against PA, GA, Wi, MI ("Pagaweemee") regarding their vote counting. SCOTUS dismissed it on the basis of standing, i.e., a State cannot claim aggrieved status over how another State counted its votes. That's how the Constitution is designed to work. Do your experts think that the NPVIC would grant Texas, for example, standing, in such a case? I assume that it might, and given what I've seen, that could be a disaster.
It's all trying to solve a problem that's caused by winner-take-all. We should solve that, not mess around with something that's not the root of the problem. Say "California's EC votes don't reflect the popular vote!" Okay, true. There are about 57 electoral votes in California. Mostly Democrat, but about 30% Repubilcan. So say, "I live and love in Orange County, and thanks to the EC my vote doesn't count!" Hogwash. The problem is that California should be sending 16 Republican electors (I assume the two at-large electors would go Democrat).
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Texas is about 50/50%, so amazingly, it's more Democrat than California, and 38 votes. That means with Texas and California together, the Dems get 41+19 = 60, and Republican 16+19 = 35. With the winner-take-all EC, it's 57 versus 38. Population-wise California is 39.5 million and Texas is 29 million.
So Popular vote 42.2 million Dems, 26.4 million Republican or 61.5% Dem versus 38.5% Reps.
WTA EC: 57 / 95 = 60% dems, 40% repub.
"Normalized" EC: 60 / 95 = 63.1% dems, 36.8% Republican
This doesn't mean too much without running the numbers for more states, like little agricultural ones that always vote "all Republican", like at least running all of the Western States and see what that looks like.
To my mind, it's a question of granularity. You may share this feeling, like every presidential election, except possibly the one we just had and one or both Obama ones, of "Who the hell voted for this guy? None of the people I know did, but he won at a walk. What the hell?" In other words, I look around my neighborhood and either feel like we all voted the some, but people in many, many other neighborhoods voted the other way. Or in my case, I look at my neighbors and I'm pretty sure most of them voted the other way.
The point is, one doesn't feel if everybody around voted against one, that one's vote is not being counted, is ignored. We may feel our country is bat-shit crazy and like we're somehow in danger, but not like our vote was ignored. The point is that if the votes were all counted up for my whole neighborhood, and it went one way, I'd be part of it, even if it didn't go my way. Just like if three of my neighbors voted the other way, one would cancel out my vote, and the other two would go the other way.
I don't know what I'm trying to say. I guess it's like pixels on a screen. At some point you gotta say, "This spot here is orange," once you've decided how big of dot size you're going to work with.
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I'm getting the feeling I have some fundamental work to do in order to be able to talk clearly about these things. And I think it might dovetail into the gerrymandering work I want to do. I might need a quantity like the "effective impact of a single vote" on an election. Like, effectively Wyoming has way more impact than California, for instance, since WY has like half a mil population, and one Congressional Representative, so each of their EC votes "costs" just under 200K votes, while it's more like 700K in California (and Texas). So a WY vote has three times the impact.
By the way, that might be a problem for the PNVIC -- how to deal with this unevenness of electoral votes? It's probably in keeping with how the law is to work, i..e, it doesn't matter who actually casts the electoral college votes, just how they are split up.
And actually, that's an interesting point: how should the at-large electors be selected? Is there a way to do it that's fair, and which promotes 3rd party entry?
Oh, cool idea. Instead of Wyoming giving all it's vote to some PNVIC pot, it could give one or more of its at-large electors to someplace like California. Is that an incremental move in the direction of PNVIC? Or is it just random crap? That's an important question, since if that's hard, then PNVIC is hard. So far it's the big democrat states who have signed up (that's right, no?). The hard part will be when different-party States have to hand their votes to the other side. Totally random, off-the-cup thought.
Anyway, I wrote all this crap, and it's been sitting in my drafts folder, so I thought I'd shoot it off.
PS: Thanks for the video -- I'll try to get to it soon.
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I think your remark below is the challenge so that you are building a framework which becomes clearer as your update it. Common ground for the most will help build support for incremental solutions down the road.
Thanks for all your hard work......
Thanks for all your hard work......
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I've got a little project that I've been thinking about.
I want to explore electoral legislation, namely gerrymandering and updates to electoral college legislation at the state level.
This new legislation would get rid of the "winner takes all rule." One hoped-for outcome would be that third parties would actually have a chance of getting some EC votes. Another is that the EC would more closely track the popular vote.
I'm trying to put a team together. I need to check what each State's (apart from Nebraska and Maine, though I'll want to look at them, too, since their way of choosing Electors will probably be a template) way of choosing Electors in the Presidential election looks like. The objective is to draft an amendment to each State Constitution (or whatever part of their election code, whatever that looks like) and get it to the right people (State Assembly majority and minority leaders, State party leadership, whatever) to change how Electoral College Electors are chosen. Worst case a different law would have to be drafted for each State.
What I'm envisaging at the moment would be like Nebraska and Maine (I still need to get into the details of how they work), where each Federal Congressional District would choose a different elector, and each ballot in every district would have two "at large" electors (two for each party) as well, which would be the same on every ballot in the State. Whether this would simplify the ballot that each voter had to fill in remains to be seen.
There's another initiative, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which tries to accomplish something similar, but I believe it to be wrong-headed. I need to get into the details, but it effectively has States club together to agree on voting all their electoral votes to exactly match how the popular vote went. It kicks in when 270 EC votes worth of States sign onto it, pass it. Problems abound, in my view, since one state's submission of their electoral votes depends on other states' vote counts. California, for instance, would have to wait, in principle, for a score of other states to count their votes, and if they all turn up Republican, then all of California has to vote 100% Republican, too. Are California, Texas, or all the other States then supposed to be allowed to check the other States' election certification and vote counts? Contentious election counts in any State could potentially impact the certification of dozens of other States. I should probably write a piece on this.
I need a catchy name, or I already thought of one and forgot it, but something like Uniform State Popular Electoral College Normalization Act (USPECNA? rather the same idea as the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act, but less fascist, i.e., a State-level initiative that all States need to get on board with, but, unlike NPVIC, every State that passes my law helps a bit, not all-or-nothing). Maybe SUSPECNA (Simplified Uniform State Popular Electoral College Act). I'm open to suggestions, but "The Popular People's Front of Judea" is right out.
I want to get historical election data and model how elections would have gone had this legislation been in place.
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On the Gerrymandering, I want to understand the precinct-level voter data, and the goal is to come up with some kind of analysis method that would lead to an algorithm or formula that would provide a deterministic answer as to whether Gerrymandering had taken place (even accidentally). It should be multi-party friendly as well. I'm currently trying to model things on the RISK game board for starters, and then move on to read election data. I still need to nail down sites that provide this information, and in what format. One issue I suspect will be a problem is "adjacency data," i.e., which precincts are next to one another. I've got a buddy who's shown interest in the math behind this problem.
Update of name for Uniform Voting Act.
I need a catchy name, or I already thought of one and forgot it, but something like Uniform State Popular Electoral College Normalization Act (USPECNA? rather the same idea as the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act, but less fascist, i.e., a State-level initiative that all States need to get on board with, but, unlike NPVIC, every State that passes my law helps a bit, not all-or-nothing). Maybe SUSPECNA (Simplified Uniform State Popular Electoral College Normalization Act). I'm open to suggestions, but "The Popular People's Front of Judea" is right out.
And I need to reach out to the Uniform Law Commission, and maybe they can help me with the name.
Legal Eagle did a video on the Texas suit against other States to change their election results, which is a great example of why the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, i.e., States would be required to interfere with one another's election processes in order to fulfill the requirements of this law, which this suit and the 2020 election show to be deeply problematic.
Voting Systems
I should probably try to include this in my SUSPECNA uniform legislation.
I'm putting together a project to reform voting. One prong is Gerrymandering (mainly describing it mathematically) and the other is the Electoral college (getting rid of winner-takes-all)
Gerrymandering is a separate but very important issue, as are other forms of voter suppression. This piece speaks to a number of voter suppression issues to do with operating polling stations, eg, funding.
The SUSPECNA (act) will ease pressure on election management by removing the winner takes all aspect of presidential elections. This will have many benefits leading up to and during the election.
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